The Dichotomy of Penelope and Helen of Troy by Alice Hofgren MA, University of Kansa

99 Pages·2015·0.5 MB·English

The Perfect Wife and the Evil Temptress:
The Dichotomy of Penelope and Helen of Troy

by

Alice Hofgren
M.A., University of Kansas, 2015

Submitted to the Department of
Theatre and the Faculty of
the Graduate School of the University
of Kansas in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

____________________________
Rebecca Rovit

____________________________
Jane Barnette

____________________________
Dennis Christilles

Date Defended: April 29th, 2015
ii

The Thesis Committee for Alice Hofgren
certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

The Perfect Wife and the Evil Temptress:
The Dichotomy of Penelope and Helen of Troy

________________________________
Rebecca Rovit

Date approved: April 29th, 2015
iii

Abstract

Stories about Helen of Troy and Odysseus’ wife Penelope have existed alongside each
other over the centuries since Athens dominated Greek art and culture. By considering depictions
of these two women in three time periods, this study will trace the way their stories have
changed, and what these changes may tell us about each period’s attitude towards women. This
analysis also problematizes the tropes of “the virgin” and “the whore” ro demonstrate the adverse
impact of such recurring images on women today. Starting in the fifth century, Athens, I will
consider Helen through three plays by Euripides, asking why Penelope is a major character in
Homer’s Odyssey, but does not appear in any extant Greek tragedy. Moving to the Middle Ages
in Britain, I will look at how Helen is constructed in three adaptations of Guido de Colonna's
Hystoria Troiana, as well as Penelope’s letter to her husband in John Gower’s Confessio
Amantis. I will also consider Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,
which places these women onstage and subjects them to the male gaze. My study of these
sources will attempt to discern the reasons that the character of Penelope became a well-known
ideal of femininity by the late fourteenth century, while Helen was to some extent pardoned for
inciting the Trojan War. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, US productions of theatrical
adaptations of both of these characters have received widespread attention; but what does this
mean for a feminist analysis of Helen and Persephone? To answer this question, I will use three
plays that adapt the myths of Helen and Penelope; Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, Mark
Schultz’s A Brief History of Helen of Troy, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. After
investigating my chosen time periods, I conclude that stories and dramas about the stereotypical
whore and the idealized wife have allowed two characters constructed by men in a patriarchal
culture to be re-adapted in the twenty-first century and given their own voices. These
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adaptations, however, continue to uphold Helen and Penelope as dichotomous figures, something
that hinders their ability to function as theatrical advocates for third wave feminism.
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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1

Penelope’s Absence in 5th Century Athenian Tragedy………………………………..9

The Recreation of Helen in Late Medieval England…………………………………38

Adapting Helen and Penelope for a Twenty-First Century Audience………………..65

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………88

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….90
1

Introduction

The Sojourn Theatre’s Penelope Project, created in collaboration with the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is an ongoing exploration into the true nature of Homer’s character,
Penelope. The project seeks to “[examine] the complex inner life and trials of Penelope — the
heroine who did not go out to conquer the world, but stayed at home.”1 Despite her absence in
extant Greek tragedy, interest in Penelope as a character is growing in North America through
various mediums, most recently in the theatre for social change exemplified by the Penelope
Project. In order to create a stronger awareness of Penelope as a character, the project
collaborates with residents in long-term care environments to create a performance based on
Homer’s Odyssey which reveals the similarities between Penelope’s long wait for her husband
and the long wait faced by most residents of assisted-living facilities. The comparison between
Penelope the character and the actual people living in such facilities reveals the active nature of
waiting. This is just one example of the ways in which theatre practitioners have adapted ancient
Greek characters to address important social concerns. Throughout my thesis I will explore
several ways that contemporary theatre practitioners can recreate Penelope and Helen of Troy as
active women, freed from their creation by male writers who crafted them as idealistic, not
realistic, women.
In 2007 Margaret Atwood’s play The Penelopiad premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon.2
Her play, and the book upon which it was based,3 questioned the ways Penelope has been
mythologized in Western literature and drama and sought to create a version of Penelope who
spoke with her own voice, a voice not created by male poets living in patriarchal cultures. Many
adaptations of Penelope in ancient Greece and medieval Britain placed Penelope within the
private household space culturally associated with femininity,4 but in The Penelopiad Atwood’s
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Penelope exists outside of this private space. Nor does she reside in the public male sphere, but
rather in what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space,”5 a place in between the public and the
private that undoes the opposition between the two. Along with Penelope, Helen of Troy, whose
abduction by Paris usually places her as an outsider within the public space,6 also appears in
Atwood’s play and exists within this third space. These two woman each figured heavily in
Homer’s epics, but today only Helen has become a well-known mythical character in her own
right, while Penelope is often remembered only as part of the larger story in which she appears.
Throughout this study I want to ask: Why has the figure of Helen captured the dramatic
imagination of poets and playwrights over centuries, and why has Penelope faded into a simple
representation of the chaste wife?
I will ground my study in the theory of adaptation put forth by Linda Hutcheon in her text
A Theory of Adaptation, in which she states that adaptation is often “a transcoding into a
different set of conventions.”7 Such a transcoding occurs in The Sojourn Theatre’s Penelope
Project, Atwood’s The Penelopiad, as well as in several English medieval texts that I will
address later in this paper. Each text that I investigate is an adaptation of ancient Greek myths
that existed before they were written about by Homer, or further adapted by Athenian
playwrights. By contextualizing these adaptations I will demonstrate the ways that the characters
of Penelope and Helen were transformed to fit the cultural norms that governed the times in
which they were written. I will consider depictions of Helen of Troy and Penelope in three
separate time periods and locations. First, I will ground my study in ancient Greece, where the
myths of these two women originated. The first mention of Penelope in extant texts occurs in
Homer’s Odyssey, probably written around the 8th century BCE.8 Through a close reading of this
epic poem I will show that the figure of Penelope is far more than merely a docile and loyal wife.
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This characterization of Penelope was a common representation of the character (into whom she
was transformed in the European Middle Ages; and this medieval transformation persists in our
literary and dramatic imagination today. Penelope, however, is one of the most active characters
in Homer’s poem, who displays extreme cunning and intelligence in that she avoids marriage to
any of her numerous suitors. She also averts conflicts with her son over control of their
household. As a woman, Penelope embodies characteristics of the perfect Greek woman. As I
shall show, however, she was far more than a grieving and faithful wife.
Helen too appears in the Odyssey, but as a minor character. It is in Athenian theatre that
Aeschylus and Euripides represent Helen in a total of four plays. I will focus on these two
playwrights to discover why Helen was such a popular figure for fifth- century tragedians, while
Penelope does not appear in a single play, and in fact is never even mentioned by name. By
analyzing the theatrical representations of Helen by these two playwrights, we may gain insight
into how the role of women was idealized and vilified in ancient Greek society.
Central to my understanding of the depictions of Penelope and Helen in theatre texts is
the idea of space, and how space for the ancient Greeks was divided into the public and the
private, which corresponded with masculine and feminine attributes.9 My argument about the
theoretical spaces assigned to women, as well as their representation onstage in the physical
theatre space, is well-supported by Sue-Ellen Case’s article “Classical Drag: The Greek Creation
of Female Parts.”10 Case contends that “‘Woman’ appeared on the stage, in the myths, and in the
plastic arts, representing the patriarchal values attached to the gender of ‘Woman’ while
suppressing the experiences, fantasies, feelings, and stories of actual women.”11 This split
between actual Greek women and the women represented onstage by male actors is crucial to my
understanding of Helen and Penelope as ideal women, created through male fantasy and far
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removed from the lives of fifth-century Athenian women. As I shall argue for the Greeks, and
especially for fifth- century Athenians, Helen the character was fascinating because she violated
the private space of women by leaving her husband to accompany Paris to Troy. In several plays
from the period by Aeschylus and Euripides, Helen is casually referred to as a whore or a wicked
woman,12 because she neglects her duty as a wife to maintain her husband’s household. In
addition to Case, I will rely on several other theorists to establish the notion of divided space in
ancient Greece, specifically Lin Foxhall, Helene Foley, Ruth Padel, and David Wiles. Theories
of male and female spaces and the manifestation of such spaces in literary depictions of Helen
and Penelope are paramount to my study, especially given the significance for current third-wave
feminists of such spaces. I draw on Jill Dolan’s writings on the male gaze13 to establish the
presence of this gaze in theatrical depictions of Helen and Penelope. Using theorizations of
gendered space,14 I will consider the ways Helen and Penelope conform to or reject their place
within the interior female space of the Greek household, a space known as the oikos (οίκος), on
which I will elaborate in chapter one.
For centuries after the fall of Athens to Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars, the writings of
Greek philosophers and tragedians were little-known in Northern Europe, but were highly
regarded in Eastern Arabic countries.15 Following the Crusades, these texts were brought to
Europe, where an explosion of interest in Greek myth occurred. The fascination with ancient
Greek life and literature led to many poetic retellings of the stories of Helen and Penelope during
the European Middle Ages. For this reason, the second time period I will consider is medieval
Britain, from 1100-1500 CE. This large span of time includes three poetic adaptations16 of a
tenth-century Italian poem that tells the story of the Trojan War. Helen figures heavily in each of
the adaptations, but her willingness to accompany Paris to Troy, an action that incites the Trojan
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War, is described differently in each poem. Using Corinne Saunders’ analysis of medieval laws
governing the rape and abduction of women, 17 I will show how Helen has been transformed
from the seductive temptress of ancient Greece into a political tool whose consent in her own
abduction has no bearing on her fate. Epic poets also transformed the classic figure of Penelope
during this time period, deviating from Homer’s cunning depiction to portray what may be
considered the ideal medieval wife. As in my first chapter, the concept of gendered space in
medieval Britain informs my analysis of these poetic rewritings of the myths of Helen and
Penelope. The domestic sphere in this period, and the violation of the private female space,
whether the unauthorized entrance of a man or the departure of a woman, is even more
significant. The realm of the household is of paramount importance in medieval poetic
recreations of Helen and Penelope. In addition to space, the physical female body is a recurring
theme in British medieval literature about Helen and Penelope. Michal Kolbiaka’s This is my
Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages,18 provides us with a means to
consider corporeality and the construction of the female body In this chapter, I will look at the
way that medieval poets represent/ re-construct the bodies of Helen and Penelope to consider
what these constructions may tell us about today’s continued fascination with Helen and
Penelope and their bodies.
Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,19 serves as an
important theatrical example to offset the poetic representations of Helen and Penelope. In his
play, Helen appears as a non-speaking character. Rereading Faustus with an understanding of the
male gaze that permeated the medieval British stage and carried over into the early Renaissance,
I will demonstrate the way that the female body was perceived as a political tool for men, and
how the gaze of male theatre spectators, as well as the embodiment by male actors, controlled